A Mans Woman | Page 8

cold gray of the heavens. Then he
shot a glance above him.
"God Almighty, bless her and keep her!" he prayed.
Far off, miles away, an ice-floe split with the prolonged reverberation
of thunder. The aurora was gone. Ferriss returned to the tent.
The following week the expedition suffered miserably. Snowstorm
followed snowstorm, the temperature dropped to twenty-two degrees
below the freezing-point, and gales of wind from the east whipped and
scourged the struggling men incessantly with myriad steel-tipped lashes.
At night the agony in their feet was all but unbearable. It was
impossible to be warm, impossible to be dry. Dennison, in a measure,
recovered his health, but the ulcer on McPherson's foot had so eaten the
flesh that the muscles were visible. Hawes's monotonous chatter and
crazy whimperings filled the tent every night.
The only pleasures left them, the only breaks in the monotony of that
life, were to eat, and, when possible, to sleep. Thought, reason, and
reflection dwindled in their brains. Instincts--the primitive, elemental
impulses of the animal--possessed them instead. To eat, to sleep, to be
warm--they asked nothing better. The night's supper was a vision that
dwelt in their imaginations hour after hour throughout the entire day.
Oh, to sit about the blue flame of alcohol sputtering underneath the old
and battered cooker of sheet-iron! To smell the delicious savour of the
thick, boiling soup! And then the meal itself--to taste the hot, coarse,
meaty food; to feel that unspeakably grateful warmth and glow, that
almost divine sensation of satiety spreading through their poor,
shivering bodies, and then sleep; sleep, though quivering with cold;
sleep, though the wet searched the flesh to the very marrow; sleep,

though the feet burned and crisped with torture; sleep, sleep, the
dreamless stupefaction of exhaustion, the few hours' oblivion, the day's
short armistice from pain!
But stronger, more insistent than even these instincts of the animal was
the blind, unreasoned impulse that set their faces to the southward: "To
get forward, to get forward." Answering the resistless influence of their
leader, that indomitable man of iron whom no fortune could break nor
bend, and who imposed his will upon them as it were a yoke of
steel--this idea became for them a sort of obsession. Forward, if it were
only a yard; if it were only a foot. Forward over the heart-breaking,
rubble ice; forward against the biting, shrieking wind; forward in the
face of the blinding snow; forward through the brittle crusts and icy
water; forward, although every step was an agony, though the haul-rope
cut like a dull knife, though their clothes were sheets of ice. Blinded,
panting, bruised, bleeding, and exhausted, dogs and men, animals all,
the expedition struggled forward.
One day, a little before noon, while lunch was being cooked, the sun
broke through the clouds, and for upward of half an hour the ice-pack
was one blinding, diamond glitter. Bennett ran for his sextant and got
an observation, the first that had been possible for nearly a month. He
worked out their latitude that same evening.
The next morning Ferriss was awakened by a touch on his shoulder.
Bennett was standing over him.
"Come outside here a moment," said Bennett in a low voice. "Don't
wake the men."
"Did you get our latitude?" asked Ferriss as the two came out of the
tent.
"Yes, that's what I want to tell you."
"What is it?"
"Seventy-four-nineteen."
"Why, what do you mean?" asked Ferriss quickly.
"Just this: That the ice-pack we're on is drifting faster to the north than
we are marching to the south. We are farther north now than we were a
month ago for all our marching."

II.
By eleven o'clock at night the gale had increased to such an extent and

the sea had begun to build so high that it was a question whether or not
the whaleboat would ride the storm. Bennett finally decided that it
would be impossible to reach the land--stretching out in a long, dark
blur to the southwest--that night, and that the boat must run before the
wind if he was to keep her afloat. The number two cutter, with Ferriss
in command, was a bad sailer, and had fallen astern. She was already
out of hailing distance; but Bennett, who was at the whaleboat's tiller,
in the instant's glance that he dared to shoot behind him saw with
satisfaction that Ferriss had followed his example.
The whaleboat and the number two cutter were the only boats now left
to the expedition. The third boat had been abandoned long before they
had reached open water.
An hour later Adler, the sailing-master, who had been bailing, and who
sat facing Bennett, looked back through the storm; then, turning to
Bennett, said:
"Beg pardon, sir, I think they are